Which loads faster: HTML or PHP

[chem3]

Hello,

Which loads faster a web page written in HTML or the same page written in (output by) PHP? Why?

Thanks in advance!

[jkd]

HTML of course. PHP pages require being run through a PHP interpretter, which no matter how fast, takes more time then just dumping a file's contents.

For all practical purposes though, the speed difference won't be noticable.

[felgall]

If you tell the server to process all yout HTML pages through the PHP parser then they will take fractionally longer to load than if you don't parse them for PHP first. PHP pages that don't contain any PHP would be fractionally faster if you rename them to HTML (and don't parse them as PHP) but the difference will be so slight as to be not noticable.